Ensuring that a target audience is being effectively exposed to advertising material is a key issue of any advertising or marketing activity, whether it is in the field of direct marketing or brand advertising. This problem is also suffered by “mobile marketing,” which involves and relates to marketing and advertising via mobile devices, e.g., phones, smart phones, and Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), or any other computer device configured to be able to receive or send data wirelessly, receiving promotional material, i.e., marketing and/or advertising content in the form of, e.g., text, audio, video or some combination thereof associated with a particular product, service or combination thereof.
Mobile marketing enables advertisers to directly reach individual consumers in a targeted way. This is because the nature of mobile media is personal, in that mobile devices are generally used by a particular individual rather than a group of individuals. Further, mobile media is, by definition, mobile, which offers a transportable mechanism for exposing potential consumers to promotional material. Moreover, because mobile media is “always on,” advertisers are not constrained by the need to make a connection in order to deliver promotional material to a user's device because a connection is always established with a user's mobile device (provided the mobile device is in range of an available communication network). As an additional benefit of mobile media as an advertising mechanism, mobile media enables groups of individuals to form wherein the group members communicate actively with each other. As a result, these characteristics combined with social networks-based marketing approach of the Internet may form a very powerful base to execute marketing strategies.
However, there is a cost associated with this targeted distribution of promotional material. Typically the cost is associated with delivery of a direct advertisement message to a targeted individual (i.e., someone who has the attributes identified in an advertising campaign) by direct marketing, or media space in brand advertising. Therefore, an advertiser will attempt to ensure that promotional material is distributed effectively to ensure that the targeted individual is exposed to the promotional material.